and i do eat foods fortified with vitamin D which i know come from animal sources, for example my soy milk. vitamin D is in many "processed" foods. i suppose this could be a whole other discussion topic, and i certainly don't mean to veer intentionally off topic, but i wonder how others feel about the vitamin D in foods either naturally or enriched? is this something you go out of your way to avoid and seek out substitutes for?

I don't think there are any soy milks in the U.S. anyway that are fortified with nonvegan vitamin D. 8th Continent used to have D3 but doesn't anymore. Other products, like cereals, are a different story.

just checked, my plain enriched soy dream has vitamin D. soy dream does make a non-enriched version

when we were little, my dad used to bring home hunks of honeycomb sometimes and hand us pieces of it, and we'd be like, "dad, we don't want it," and he'd be like, "no, it's so good, you want it, just eat it," and we'd be like, "but can we just lick off the honey?" even though we didn't like the honey anyway, and he'd be like, "no, it's so good! you like it! chew it like gum!" and we'd eat it but we'd hate it and we'd cry and dribble honey and angry kid spit and tears all over our oshkosh b'goshes. so i say honey tastes like blarrrgggh and wounded confusion and impotent rage, and agave tastes like something else that is clean and sweet and so much better, and i'm glad they have almost nothing in common.

_________________"rise from the ashes of douchebaggery like a fancy vegan phoenix" - amandabear"I'm pretty sure the moral of this story is: fork pants." - cq

when we were little, my dad used to bring home hunks of honeycomb sometimes and hand us pieces of it, and we'd be like, "dad, we don't want it," and he'd be like, "no, it's so good, you want it, just eat it," and we'd be like, "but can we just lick off the honey?" even though we didn't like the honey anyway, and he'd be like, "no, it's so good! you like it! chew it like gum!" and we'd eat it but we'd hate it and we'd cry and dribble honey and angry kid spit and tears all over our oshkosh b'goshes. so i say honey tastes like blarrrgggh and wounded confusion and impotent rage, and agave tastes like something else that is clean and sweet and so much better, and i'm glad they have almost nothing in common.

Am I a bad person because I laughed so hard at this i spit my tea out?

I don't think there are any soy milks in the U.S. anyway that are fortified with nonvegan vitamin D. 8th Continent used to have D3 but doesn't anymore. Other products, like cereals, are a different story.

just checked, my plain enriched soy dream has vitamin D. soy dream does make a non-enriched version

yeah I've never seen a soymilk with nonvegan D except for 8th Continent, as strawberryrock mentioned.

ETA: Though I have seen strawberry soymilk colored with cochineal, which is made from insects- so something else to watch out for.

_________________"If I were M. de la Viandeviande, I would now write a thirteen page post about how you have to have free will to be vegan, but modern science does not suggest any evidence for free will, therefore it is impossible to be vegan." -mumbles

Maybe if you were a connoisseur of fine honeys you'd be dissatisfied with any of the alternatives. Different varieties of honey have some really complex & subtle flavours & I totally get why people love to eat it. I used to love candied honey when I was a kid. As an adult, all I was using honey for was to sweeten salad dressings & other such purposes, so it wasn't really about the honey so much as the sweet syrup aspect, so that's why agave is more than satisfactory to me. Light agave is really neutral, just like cane sugar, without any perceptible after taste, which has its own value. Golden syrup is just like liquid toffee (yum!) & much closer to honey in viscosity, although not in nutritional value. Sweet Freedom syrup isn't quite as thick as honey, but nearly, & I do have that on toast & in porridge as well as using it in dressings, etc. It's good stuff. http://www.sweetfreedom.co.uk/ As for bees just being bees, well bees are really important & without them & they're magical pollinating powers, we'd all be in some serious trouble, so I think they deserve our respect.

I really don't care too much about the ethical implications of eating honey. They're f'n bees. However, I don't eat honey ever because honey is by definition NOT vegan and it's ridiculously easy to avoid. If you're going to do something do it right. Avoiding honey is doing vegan right.

I'd much prefer to do vegan wrong. And then write a blues song about it. Vegan Done Wrong Blues.

_________________Panda With Cookie If I get caught as a fugitive eating chain pizza, its going to be Pizza Hut. -linanilanil

I might have to try that "honey" recipe! My soy milk of choice is the Woolies Macro one which doesn't contain any vitamin D - neither does the VitaCafé I have in the cupboard. Which brands are fortified? Nuttelex contains vegetable-based D & I'm trying to think if there's anything else I use that's fortified with vitamin D that doesn't have "suitable for vegans" written on it!

when we were little, my dad used to bring home hunks of honeycomb sometimes and hand us pieces of it, and we'd be like, "dad, we don't want it," and he'd be like, "no, it's so good, you want it, just eat it," and we'd be like, "but can we just lick off the honey?" even though we didn't like the honey anyway, and he'd be like, "no, it's so good! you like it! chew it like gum!" and we'd eat it but we'd hate it and we'd cry and dribble honey and angry kid spit and tears all over our oshkosh b'goshes.

WHAT IS WITH PEOPLE WANTING YOU TO CHEW ON BEEWAX?I went to visit an organic farm last month and the guy trotted us out to his little beehives that have special bees (not honeybees) and to my horror, cracked the thing open and insisted that we all chew on the little pockets of honey (they looked like those little floaties on seaweed)-- FC and I looked at each other and were like "no forking way am i putting that shiitake in my mouth". We had to deflect attention to the girl who had a bee allergy and yet was trying to put her hand in the hive- and we GTFOd.

I might have to try that "honey" recipe! My soy milk of choice is the Woolies Macro one which doesn't contain any vitamin D - neither does the VitaCafé I have in the cupboard. Which brands are fortified? Nuttelex contains vegetable-based D & I'm trying to think if there's anything else I use that's fortified with vitamin D that doesn't have "suitable for vegans" written on it!

i honestly have no idea if my soy dream enriched soy milk has the words 'vegan' anywhere on it... i'll have to check.....

_________________"....but I finally found block tempeh a few weeks ago with the intent to give it my virginity." -Moon

I might have to try that "honey" recipe! My soy milk of choice is the Woolies Macro one which doesn't contain any vitamin D - neither does the VitaCafé I have in the cupboard. Which brands are fortified? Nuttelex contains vegetable-based D & I'm trying to think if there's anything else I use that's fortified with vitamin D that doesn't have "suitable for vegans" written on it!

i honestly have no idea if my soy dream enriched soy milk has the words 'vegan' anywhere on it... i'll have to check.....

ETA: my feeling about honey is much like others here. I used to love it, and it was the last thing I phased out, but I do avoid it. I find the ethics of honey to be fuzzier than that of the dairy/egg industry, and I haven't done enough research to decide exactly how I feel about it, but it's easy enough to avoid. And while I agree that agave doesn't taste like honey (and I was a honey snob), the same could be said of a lot of plant-based items (e.g. plant milks don't taste anything like dairy milk), but you get used to the taste and it's just fine at a certain point.

_________________I ate the shiitake out of inappropriateness. - Hollie

This is a very very complex issue that has more to do with the way we commercially grow our food (and eat), travel and import/export than to eat or not to eat honey. Without honey bees you would have no almonds, for example. If you eat almonds, you support the commercial bee industry. No wild bees can live there. There is no way to turn the clock back if we want to continue to feed everyone, and to eat the way we do (anything, whenever we want, and cheap).

I compare someone with a few hives in their yard vs a commercial beekeeper to someone who has a pet dog vs someone running a puppy mill.

I don't even know what honey taste like anymore, among other things. But with agave, brown rice syrup, and coconut nectar it's not hard to avoid if you want to. I do find it hard sometimes to get vegan bread in some stores. And in that case if I am in a pinch I will buy bread with honey. Otherwise I just won't buy any until I can get some without it.

My reasoning for not eating honey is because I don't have to and I don't want to steal the bees lively hood and hard work.

Recently I had a few people give me crepe over not eating honey. They claimed that if I ate local honey within a 5 mile radius of where I live it would do wonders for my allergies. I have no idea if this is true or not. But I don't care, I'm not adding honey back into my life. Even before being vegan I never really used it for much of anything. I think I used to add it to tuna which I don't eat anymore, so there you go!

Bottom line is that none of us are perfect and there is not perfect vegan. We all do what we can and what we want to do.

Joined: Tue Nov 30, 2010 8:03 pmPosts: 6308Location: The State Of No R's

solipsistnation wrote:

...I like to chew on beeswax. I haven't in years, but it's kind of weirdly fun.

Wax bottles! Are those beeswax though? When I was younger I used to chew on wax bottles once I drank the juice from them.

_________________"...anarchists only want to burn cars and punch cops."- nickvicious"We'll be eating our own words 30 years from now when we're demanding our legislators outlaw aerosol-based cyber dildo-wielding death holograms."- Brian

The hardest part of not eating honey is that it is an ingredient in so many bread products. Vegan Pet Peeve!

Quote:

Recently I had a few people give me crepe over not eating honey. They claimed that if I ate local honey within a 5 mile radius of where I live it would do wonders for my allergies. I have no idea if this is true or not. But I don't care, I'm not adding honey back into my life. Even before being vegan I never really used it for much of anything. I think I used to add it to tuna which I don't eat anymore, so there you go!

That sounds interesting...and not true. I did a quick internet search on the allergies thing and most of the effects of honey on allergies is anecdotal. That is, there is no science to back it up.

Here is what WebMD had to say on the matter, which is exactly inline with what other sites said on my search, and the doctor talking about it seems legit:

Quote:

By Susan Davis WebMD the Magazine - FeatureReviewed by Laura J. Martin, MDIn every issue of WebMD the Magazine, we ask experts to answer readers' questions about a wide range of topics, including some of the most cherished medical myths out there. For our March/April 2012 issue, we talked to Michael Palumbo, MD, an allergist with Allergy & Clinical Immunology Associates in Pittsburgh, about the popular idea that honey helps prevent allergies.

Q: Can local honey help my allergies?

A: No. The theory that taking in small amounts of pollen by eating local honey to build up immunity is FALSE.

Here's why: It's generally the pollen blowing in the wind (released by non-flowering trees, weeds, and grasses) that triggers springtime allergies, not the pollen in flowers carried by bees. So even local honey won’t have much, if any, of the type of pollen setting off your allergies.

Studies show bees don’t just bring flower pollen back to their honeycomb. They bring "tree and grass pollen, in addition to mold spores, diesel particles, and other contaminants," says Palumbo. The problem is that it’s difficult to make a honey from just one kind of pollen (say, weeds and not grass). So, save your local honey for your tea and toast, not for your allergy medicine cabinet.

That sounds interesting...and not true. I did a quick internet search on the allergies thing and most of the effects of honey on allergies is anecdotal. That is, there is no science to back it up.

Here is what WebMD had to say on the matter, which is exactly inline with what other sites said on my search, and the doctor talking about it seems legit:

Quote:

By Susan Davis WebMD the Magazine - FeatureReviewed by Laura J. Martin, MDIn every issue of WebMD the Magazine, we ask experts to answer readers' questions about a wide range of topics, including some of the most cherished medical myths out there. For our March/April 2012 issue, we talked to Michael Palumbo, MD, an allergist with Allergy & Clinical Immunology Associates in Pittsburgh, about the popular idea that honey helps prevent allergies.

Q: Can local honey help my allergies?

A: No. The theory that taking in small amounts of pollen by eating local honey to build up immunity is FALSE.

Here's why: It's generally the pollen blowing in the wind (released by non-flowering trees, weeds, and grasses) that triggers springtime allergies, not the pollen in flowers carried by bees. So even local honey won’t have much, if any, of the type of pollen setting off your allergies.

Studies show bees don’t just bring flower pollen back to their honeycomb. They bring "tree and grass pollen, in addition to mold spores, diesel particles, and other contaminants," says Palumbo. The problem is that it’s difficult to make a honey from just one kind of pollen (say, weeds and not grass). So, save your local honey for your tea and toast, not for your allergy medicine cabinet.

In my husband's case it IS true! Sometimes science doesn't explain everything. I'm sure it doesn't help every single person, nothing does.

I don't know that I'm sold on the honey helping allergies thing. You would really have to eat local, fresh, natural untouched honey that was just harvested. Picking up a bottle off the shelf in the store isn't going to do anything. And you would have to consume it daily for a long while before possibly seeing results. I say meh, I've suffered from allergies my whole life and I'm allergic to everything outdoors related as well as dust and pet dander. I've learned to live with it and yes sometimes I have bad attacks and it sucks. But without proof that the honey will really help me I'd rather not start consuming it again. I also have three cats and my house is never dust free so I'm obviously ok with torturing myself!

Studies show bees don’t just bring flower pollen back to their honeycomb. They bring "tree and grass pollen, in addition to mold spores, diesel particles, and other contaminants," says Palumbo. The problem is that it’s difficult to make a honey from just one kind of pollen (say, weeds and not grass). So, save your local honey for your tea and toast, not for your allergy medicine cabinet.

In my husband's case it IS true! Sometimes science doesn't explain everything. I'm sure it doesn't help every single person, nothing does.

yeah, you'd figure the fact that just flying through the air with a sticky polleny mass on your legs catching anything that's in the air would be supportive of the allergy thing. after all, you don't want to introduce so much of the single source pollen that affects you so that you get an acute reaction, you want to slowly build up the immunity.

From what I understand, some commercial beekeepers gas their colonies and just buy new ones after the harvest because it takes time for the bees to start producing again. Don't quote me on this though. Also, the sugar syrup used to replace the honey is bad for bee bodies.